


some other option

by Eva



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eva/pseuds/Eva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The First Order is part of the Empire's cycle: a cycle that Finn would dearly love to break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some other option

—The best was having nothing. No hope. No name in the throat.

And finding the breath in you, the body, to ask.—

(Tracy K. Smith)

 

 

Each time Poe visits, after Finn wakes, he finds him reading. Holoscript after holoscript, devouring history–Rebel and Resistance history.

 

“Why?” he finally asks, days and days into Finn’s recovery.

 

Finn shrugs. “Bored.”

 

—

 

It’s more than boredom. Or, rather, it’s less. A lack of fear.

 

Because it’s boredom and fear that define the life of a stormtrooper, Poe comes to find out; it’s boredom and fear that define the life of a being caught up in the First Order.

 

“I know they can’t tell what I’m thinking–well, if it’s not Kylo Ren staring at me, I mean–but they find out. They always find out.”

 

It’s drill after drill, practice and training and recitation–oaths to the Order. Poe feels a bit sick, hearing this. He doesn’t clench his fists, doesn’t swallow hard against the bile rising in his throat because he can’t flinch, not now, not in front of Finn. FN–whatever. Finn now, forever. Because he is more than a string of numbers, was always more, but now he knows it.

 

“You learn the history they want you to know. Their history. I mean, I can tell you anything you want to know about the Empire–well, anything they’d consider good. I can tell you about the Death Star. They started the Starkiller at the same time, but the Starkiller–you know it wasn’t supposed to work like that, right? It wasn’t supposed to just, to just eat the entire sun like that. What’s the point of a weapon you can only fire once, right? It was supposed to charge for months, a living planet turned into a weapon, with the option–”

 

The words like a river, like the rapids of a river, and Poe is drowning in them. He grasps at air–”Yeah, no, yeah–” letting Finn talk, letting the words flow over him and batter him, because this is the first time, the first time in twenty-three years, that Finn has been able to talk. Has been able to try, somehow, to make sense of what the First Order is, what it wants, what it did to him.

 

“–and it’s just, if I know both sides, if I know what the Resistance has to say, then I have the whole picture, right? I know what the First Order will do, because it IS the Empire, right? They think the Empire was entirely right, they think it’s the only way to do things, so if I know what the Empire would do then I know what the First Order will do–”

 

And the room, it’s just a recovery room, it’s blank and it’s bare and it’s not meant to be a home, by any means, but Poe wants to fill it with life, with plants and pictures and people to distract Finn from the future he is trying so desperately to fight right here and now, with his back still healing, with his mind still healing, still reeling from twenty-three years of conditioning–

 

“–and they’ll always do the same thing they’ve always done, they have to, because they think they’re perfect! And we don’t have to react to them, Poe, we can ACT, we can change everything–”

 

And it’s hope, burning in his voice, burning in his eyes and in his still broken but healing body, and it’s the same burning that made Poe trust him in the first place, made him love him–this bright, desperate, impossible flame–made him believe that there was some other option than, well.

 

Annihilation.

 

“It doesn’t have to keep happening. There’s… there’s something other than just, than just fighting the same war. Over and over again.”


End file.
